The Word Cloud

There’s a Tom Waits song about a bird that falls in love with a whale. Don’t laugh. Love’s like that you know, it breaks out in the most unlikely places. And between the most ineligible people. And the timing’s always wrong. At least it always seemed that way to me.

Take me and Charlie for instance; compared to us the bird and whale had it easy. 

Charlie. I can still remember those brown eyes softening and wistful and the sound of her voice caressing the words as they left her throat. I remember her body. I daydream about her smile. I can still recall the way her black hair tumbled from the kind of face for which men used to go to war. If I close my eyes I can still see the sheer unadulterated grace of the woman; recapture the taste of her mouth. There was no way I wasn’t going to fall for her.

It was September the twelfth 2001. The night after 9/11. There was a fragile feel to the world. A sense that something had changed for ever, though no-one was quite sure what. For a few days people were reaching out to try and find something to hold onto in one another. Seeking reassurance maybe that there was still a trace of beauty left in humanity. Wanting confirmation that as a species we hadn’t fallen as far as it seemed we had or weren’t as broken as deep down inside we knew ourselves to be. Or maybe that’s too contrived a thought. Maybe we were just all feeling vulnerable. Wondering, perhaps for the first time, what happened when we lost our invincibility; when we couldn’t rely on a tomorrow: trying to come to terms with the deep rooted fragility that as humans we spend our whole lives disguising and running away from.

Whatever it was, Charlie and I found ourselves together sharing a bottle of wine and some pasta in a little Italian place off Grafton Street. We had spent the day attending some kind of technical training course on “Banking in the new Millennium”, were in the same syndicate group and, drifting from the bar at vaguely the same time, had found ourselves walking in the same direction. It was natural to go outside for food.

The sun was dying softly in the sky and the pavement doors of the restaurant were thrown open. There was late summer heat in the air, and all around the room were those of us who, for today anyway, felt that the simple pleasure afforded by red wine and pasta, eaten in lengthening shadows whilst enjoying the company of close friends, represented the best experience that money could buy. And if there were no close friends to hand, then the convivial companionship of strangers might even compensate. It was that kind of night. There was electricity in the atmosphere; a kind of joyfulness and celebration. That night everyone was a survivor; or at least that’s how it felt.

I’ll never forget the conversation. Sitting with the light down low, with two empty bottles of red standing drained and wanton between us on the table. With Aretha Franklin moaning out four decades of her own personal lost journey in between the ad break sound bytes and the space between us tingling with the possibility of exploration. Later I came to think that if I could live one night of my life again, just one, that would be the one. Over and over as I’d turn the counter back to zero I’d make it Groundhog night for me.

Charlie had been in Vienna the previous weekend. In fact she had flown back on the day in question, hearing of the New York wounding on a television set in Heathrow airport while waiting for a flight to Dublin with her fella. Not a good place to hear that news, you would be thinking.

You’d be right.

She had friends and family caught within the radius of aching, and had would have been building her own future in Long Island but for the vagaries of love. Had a cousin working in Manhattan and she was bruised inside. You only had to look into her eyes.

There were candles flickering on the table, and the restaurant was filled with the hum of people talking. People who felt they knew what it was like to be passed over by the angel of death. Who, despite the fact that they lived their lives out miles away from where the planes had struck, had a very real and tangible understanding that night of the fragility of human and that the clock was running down on being. People who, Ireland being Ireland, all knew someone who knew someone; who maybe even knew somebody themselves. The atmosphere in the restaurant reeked of intimacy. It was a night for people taking chances; evaluating everything. A night, if ever there was a night, when people fall in love.

We had just begun the second bottle of wine when the stories began.  I watched the half light flicker in Charlie’s soft brown eyes. Already I felt like I was drowning. Her smile was tentative, her voice confessional. We sat for hours, talking in the sentences that should belong to lovers; eyes meeting and holding for just a moment before flicking sideways, breaking the connection. I was sensing that she wanted to articulate the ways she hurt inside; of how she’d journeyed, what she hoped for, what had made her cry. I sensed that she was almost ready to surrender to the magic of the night and fully trust me. Open up a doorway on her secret soul and let me look inside. Yet for some reason, known only to herself she was not quite letting go. Not quite abandoned to the moment. Instead she told me about Vienna.

They’re burned into me those stories. Years later I figured that she set up a base camp in the recesses of my heart when she described her weekend there. Especially her evening at the opera. It escaped my notice that she’d been there with her fella, or maybe I just chose to ignore the fact. As I say, the place reeked of intimacy, and maybe that gave me a temporary courage. Whatever it was, I remember it still as if it was yesterday. The base camp remains. Though Charlie never quite saw the expedition through.

They’d sat in the front row she told me, eyes gleaming at the memory. At the opera in Vienna. I can’t remember what specifically they’d been to see, but that wasn’t the point. No, it was how she described an old Austrian lady sitting beside them in the row. Old, a little wizened, almost certainly poor. Clutching a bouquet of flowers. Twisting it in her hands throughout the programme. Afraid to set it down. The way that Charlie told it, you could see the woman’s every movement. Capture the sheer joy in her eyes at the music, at the magic. And then at the end, in the standing ovation, Charlie told me how the old lady had thrown her bouquet onto the stage. Eyes a little damp, Charlie’s whole body seemed to glide in one fluid movement as she mimed the throw. There was grace, compassion, and genuine understanding in her whole gesture. And in that moment my life changed. I brought her deep inside my inner being. She’s still there.

I think that in that pure moment of empathy I sensed that maybe this woman might understand me too. That she might maybe want to know me. Touch my isolation and bring some gentleness to bear on the hardening ridges of the angst that seemed to define me those days. I wondered what it would be like to hear her whisper my name. As I said, it was that kind of night.

Donal Ballantyne – forty eight years old back then and as grey as the next career Bank man. Too old you’d think to fall in love.

A Banker since leaving school the thing I’d always aspired to was to make music. In the 1970s I used to gig in one of Belfast’s few coffee bars, and the occasional university function. But somehow I’d ended up working in the Allied Irish and had, over almost thirty years of service become a Senior Manager in the Marketing Department. Seems you can fool some people sometimes.

Still, occasionally my soul would struggle to the surface and so some nights I’d take out the old Martin acoustic and sing, carefully unfolding the words of long ago songs that I keep in a fading blue folder in a drawer, reminding myself of when I still had aspirations. The time that I still was a dreamer. The dog would listen, looking vaguely wise.

What joy I did have, and it was real deep joy, was at home. For most of those long years I’d been married to Kathleen though by then our two sons were at University. It was a marriage that had long since identified its purpose and function as being a life support system to the boys. It was not that it was an unhappy marriage, nor one lacking in fulfilment. No, it was more that Kathleen and I created one of those couples whose lives were painted in mute colours. There were no real dramatic corners of our existence. No wild post-structural green and yellow abstracts caught the eye upon the landscape of the life we had so painstakingly built together. Kathleen back then was my best friend. She was always going to be my best friend, and we imagined no surprises lurking in our relationship that might destabilise our carefully constructed world. Except that there had been a surprise. And we had only heard about it in recent weeks.

I suppose my mind was still numb with the thought that Kathleen would not be long with me. And that her passing would cause her such pain. Back then I could only approach the thought through momentary glances, as a child peeks at terror through splayed fingers before closing the space quickly. Hiding from what I knew to be there, as if by hiding I might somehow deny the inevitable. I had not been able yet to articulate, even in my head, a word for dying. I couldn’t hold it in my mouth.

I’d been with Charlie in the restaurant a long time; talking. The late afternoon colours had bled into evening and the early autumn sun died slowly and we drank wine and laid out our scars, all unpicked, on the table between us. Souls used to hiding away under layers. Designer layers masking urchin rags. Two people well versed in self protection. I imagined kissing Charlie. Feeling the taste of her tongue in my mouth. And for just a moment it seemed to me that if I did that she might melt right into me. Her eyes were fixed on my face and the fingers of her left hand were resting lightly on my wrist. The night was potentially endless. And just for that moment I wondered if she was a kind of resurrection and if she could maybe come to be my life although I only just that evening noticed that I might be dead. But the approaching loss of Kathleen had begun a process in me, compounding what I knew were the effects of soulless year on soulless year spent in the Marketing Department trumpeting the joys of debt.

Charlie the resurrection; the woman graced to be my Life. Actually, I still feel that in a way.

Notwithstanding every twist of fate.

I don’t really know how Charlie saw it. She never really opened any windows on what might have been going on behind those murky brown eyes of hers. Of course she had her fella. They’re getting married soon. But she did let it slip once that it felt like I had come into her life right out of left field and for just a few weeks had set her thinking. Set her wondering. Now there’s a turn up for you.

Kathleen lived for about two years after that night. Christmas 2003 was when she died. The boys and I were heartbroken. Charlie came to the funeral with her fella. By this time we’d become friends. Close friends. The moment, if there ever was a moment, lingered quite unopened well behind us. But you can always tell that there’s been something. Some broaching of the invisible barrier that normally serves to preserve the boundaries of convention. Some exploration of a kind of intimacy. But like the bird and the whale there was no common atmosphere in which love could survive. And so it never developed. Charlie, being Charlie, didn’t (or couldn’t) wait to see how a single me might fit in her world. For her the window, if there was a window, slammed tight shut. And as for me? Well I don’t think I could have found it in me to abandon the dying to begin an adventure with the living. So it might have been awhile.

It was a lesson in bad timing. I suppose some relationships just don’t get to happen, even though every chemical element within them seems so right. I think that it’s because it’s rare for two humans to find one another at such depth that maybe when it happens, they (or at least one of them) fall into the trap of believing that serendipity had pulled some strings. That it’s an intervention by the author of some great life plan. But, you know I sometimes think that love just gets itself timed out.

Just like the bird that loved the whale.

 And like it was for me and Charlie.